A woman in the man’s culture of engineering education

The study is aimed at identifying barriers to the research career of women in the academic environment of a technical university. The authors present the results of their study of the women’s status in the academic community. The study is based on a quantitative (questionnaire survey) and qualitative (biographical interviews) analysis of the opinions of students and teachers of STEM disciplines of a technical university about the features and problems of women’s professional careers. It is established that women of the same university evaluate the presence and degree of influence of barriers to the research careers differently. In some cases, women assessing their professional status note that they do not feel professional discrimination on the basis of gender. In general, the analysis revealed that women who received a STEM education use a strategy of avoiding a research career and choosing alternative career options: either outside the academic environment, or by transitioning to teaching as a way to circumvent gender barriers in grant and publication activities. © 2019 Moscow Polytechnic University. All rights reserved.Russian Foundation for Basic Research, RFBRRussian Foundation for Basic Research, RFBR: 19-011-00252in the framework of the project «Comparative analysis of social effects and the impact of institutional conditions on the professional training of engineering specialists», implemented with the support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research – RFBR (grant № 19-011-00252)

Dynamics of Vortex Pair in Radial Flow

The problem of vortex pair motion in two-dimensional plane radial flow is solved. Under certain conditions for flow parameters, the vortex pair can reverse its motion within a bounded region. The vortex-pair translational velocity decreases or increases after passing through the source/sink region, depending on whether the flow is diverging or converging, respectively. The rotational motion of two corotating vortexes in a quiescent environment transforms into motion along a logarithmic spiral in the presence of radial flow. The problem may have applications in astrophysics and geophysics.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure

KiDS0239-3211: A new gravitational quadruple lens candidate

We report the discovery of a candidate to quadrupole gravitationally lensed system KiDS0239-3211 based on the public data release 3 of the KiDS survey and machine learning techniques

A Dipole Vortex Model of Obscuring Tori in Active Galaxy Nuclei

The torus concept as an essential structural component of active galactic nuclei (AGN) is generally accepted. Here, the situation is discussed when the torus "twisting" by the radiation or wind transforms it into a dipole toroidal vortex which in turn can be a source of matter replenishing the accretion disk. Thus emerging instability which can be responsible for quasar radiation flares accompanied by matter outbursts is also discussed. The "Matreshka" scheme for an obscuring vortex torus structure capable of explaining the AGN variability and evolution is proposed. The model parameters estimated numerically for the luminosity close to the Eddington limit agree well with the observations.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, version of this paper is published in Astronomy Report

Gravitational potential of a homogeneous circular torus: new approach

The integral expression for gravitational potential of a homogeneous circular torus composed of infinitely thin rings is obtained. Approximate expressions for torus potential in the outer and inner regions are found. In the outer region a torus potential is shown to be approximately equal to that of an infinitely thin ring of the same mass; it is valid up to the surface of the torus. It is shown in a first approximation, that the inner potential of the torus (inside a torus body) is a quadratic function of coordinates. The method of sewing together the inner and outer potentials is proposed. This method provided a continuous approximate solution for the potential and its derivatives, working throughout the region.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, 1 table; some misprints in formulae were correcte

A Woman in the Man’s Culture of Engineering Education

The study is aimed at identifying barriers to the research career of women in the academic environment of a technical university. The authors present the results of their study of the women’s status in the academic community. The study is based on a quantitative (questionnaire survey) and qualitative (biographical interviews) analysis of the opinions of students and teachers of STEM disciplines of a technical university about the features and problems of women’s professional careers. It is established that women of the same university evaluate the presence and degree of influence of barriers to the research careers differently. In some cases, women assessing their professional status note that they do not feel professional discrimination on the basis of gender. In general, the analysis revealed that women who received a STEM education use a strategy of avoiding a research career and choosing alternative career options: either outside the academic environment, or by transitioning to teaching as a way to circumvent gender barriers in grant and publication activities

KiDS-SQuaD: The KiDS Strongly lensed Quasar Detection project

New methods have been recently developed to search for strong gravitational lenses, in particular lensed quasars, in wide-field imaging surveys. Here, we compare the performance of three different, morphology- and photometry- based methods to find lens candidates over the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) DR3 footprint (440 deg$^2$). The three methods are: i) a multiplet detection in KiDS-DR3 and/or Gaia-DR1, ii) direct modeling of KiDS cutouts and iii) positional offsets between different surveys (KiDS-vs-Gaia, Gaia-vs-2MASS), with purpose-built astrometric recalibrations. The first benchmark for the methods has been set by the recovery of known lenses. We are able to recover seven out of ten known lenses and pairs of quasars observed in the KiDS DR3 footprint, or eight out of ten with improved selection criteria and looser colour pre-selection. This success rate reflects the combination of all methods together, which, taken individually, performed significantly worse (four lenses each). One movelty of our analysis is that the comparison of the performances of the different methods has revealed the pros and cons of the approaches and, most of all, the complementarities. We finally provide a list of high-grade candidates found by one or more methods, awaiting spectroscopic follow-up for confirmation. Of these, KiDS 1042+0023 is to our knowledge the first confirmed lensed quasar from KiDS, exhibiting two quasar spectra at the same source redshift at either sides of a red galaxy, with uniform flux-ratio $f\approx1.25$ over the wavelength range $0.45\mu\mathrm{m}<\lambda<0.75\mu\mathrm{m}.$Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA